Art Basel Qatar Lines Up 87 Galleries for Inaugural Edition Next Year

Art Basel Qatar has named the 87 galleries that will participate in its upcoming inaugural edition. The fair, which is being produced in partnership with Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and QC+, will run February 5–7, with VIP days on February 3–4 at two venues in Doha, M7 and the Doha Design District.

The exhibitors hail from 31 countries and territories, and 16 of them, around 18 percent, will show at an Art Basel fair for the first time. Among those galleries participating in their first Art Basel are Hafez Gallery (of Jeddah and Riyadh, Saudia Arabia), Gallery Misr (Cairo), Le Violon Bleu (Tunis, Tunisia), Saleh Barakat Gallery (Beirut), and Tabari Artspace(Dubai, UAE).

“For me, it’s important that we have 16 galleries who are new to the Art Basel fairs,” Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s chief artistic officer and global director of fairs, told ARTnews in an interview. “With this first-year fair, we wanted to give a platform to galleries that otherwise would not have that platform.”

The upcoming Qatari fair has lined up a mix of leading international galleries, such as Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery, David Zwirner, Thaddaeus Ropac, White Cube, Michael Werner Gallery, Lisson Gallery, Gladstone Gallery, Paula Cooper Gallery, Lisson Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, Victoria Miro, David Kordansky Gallery, kurimanzutto, and Acquavella Galleries, alongside leading enterprise from the region, including Athr Gallery, Green Art Gallery, Gypsum Gallery, Loft Art Gallery, and The Third Line.

Of the fair’s 87 exhibitors, there will be three joint presentations: Pinaree Sanpitak by Ames Yavuz and Galerie Lelong, Meriem Bennani by Lodovico Corsini and François Ghebaly, Etel Adnan by Anthony Meier and Waddington Custot.

Art Basel Qatar is also the only one who has an artistic director, Doha-based artist Wael Shawky, whose appointment was announced in July. Under Shawky’s direction, Art Basel Qatar also carries a fair-wide theme, “Becoming,” which a press release describes as “[a] meditation on humanity’s constant transformation and the systems that shape how we live, believe, and create meaning.”

In an unusual move for a major fair, the booths at Art Basel Qatar will all be focused on one artist, all of which are being announced ahead of the fair. Additionally, more than half of the selected artists hail from the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa, South Asia) region. De Bellis added, “One of Wael’s goals was to showcase the potential that artists from the region have and giving them a platform at the global level.”

Artists from the region who will be exhibited from the fair include Nil Yalter, Ahmed Morsi, Mona Hatoum, Huguette Caland, Simone Fattal, Ali Banisadr, Siah Armajani, and Shirin Neshat. “The biggest revelation here is the number of artists from the region,” de Bellis said. “With approximately 50 percent of the artists coming from the MENASA region, there are going to be a lot of discoveries for many people, both for those from the region but especially those coming from abroad.”

Other artists who will have work exhibited at the fair includes a wide-ranging mix from blue-chip names like Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Christo, Alex Katz, Philip Guston, Donald Judd, Georg Baselitz, and Lynda Benglis to closely watching emerging and mid-career artists such as Alvaro Barrington, Lucy Bull, Gabriel Orozco, Nari Ward, Solange Pessoa, Anicka Yi, and Issy Wood.

This intergenerational mix “plays into Wael’s vision and how he sees each of them fitting together,” de Bellis said, noting that the fair won’t be organized according to chronology, region, or artistic mode.

Shawky and de Bellis chose the exhibiting galleries alongside a six-person selection committee consisting of Lorenzo Fiaschi of Galleria Continua, Shireen Gandhy of Chemould Prescott Road, Daniela Gareh of White Cube, Mohammed Hafiz of Athr Gallery, Sunny Rahbar of The Third Line, and Gordon VeneKlasen of Michael Werner Gallery.

First announced in May, Art Basel Qatar is the Swiss company’s fifth art fair and the newest one since the 2022 launch of Art Basel Paris, the fourth edition of which opens later this month. Unlike Art Basel’s other fairs, Art Basel Qatar has a unique structure. It is much smaller than the other fairs, whose exhibitor lists usually number around 200.

The 2026 exhibitor figure is slightly higher than the approximately 50 galleries that Art Basel had originally announced would take part. That in part has to do with the fact that the fair now has more space allocated to it across its two venues than originally planned, which allowed for them to increase the fair size to correlate with the strong interest from exhibitor applications, according to de Bellis.  

In a statement, Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz said, “With Art Basel Qatar, we are furthering our mission to be a catalyst for cultural exchange and market growth. Our gallery line-up for year one is thrilling—welcoming diverse new voices to our platform and deepening our engagement with new geographies, while also creating opportunities across our network of existing clients and established partners.”

The full exhibitor list follows below.